It really changed during the Clinton administration, where rules were established for student loans that pretty much ensured almost anyone who wanted to go to college could go to college. Since then tuition rates have dramatically exceeded inflation though. There's also the issue in that a lot of private/commercial colleges have optimized their pricing to where most people drop out to extract maximum value from the system, pretty much leaving people often unable to complete their programs the final year or half year.
I think that the opportunity for funding should have higher ties to economic demand for certain degree programs over others. I'm not opposed to people that want to go to arts programs in college, but I'm not sure that they should be taxpayer funded necessarily.
I have thought that areas where we bring in foreign workers should largely be offset with higher employer taxes and those taxes funding grants for domestic study into the fields in question. I also think we need a much broader set of trade schools for more industries than typical. Even with technology and programming.
In terms of lower high school graduation rates, I think we've dumbed down and taken things to the lowest common denominator in an extreme fashion. Common-core has failed, along with "new math" and other more modern teaching methods. My great grandmother was a teacher, and I've seen some of the text books they used in the pre-1960s, the coverage was much more thorough and difficult even at a 5th grade level than what many kids today see through the end of high school.
There should be plenty of room for vocational study as well as traditional study... but we need to stop just giving kids a pass because they're a certain age when they don't understand the core curriculem.
